


It's A Kind Of Heart Allergy

by WInger



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Banter, Character Study, Cute, Fluff, Friendship, Gen, Humor, M/M, Multi, Pet, Pet Owner, Pet dog, Relationship Study, dog love, team fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-22
Updated: 2018-08-22
Packaged: 2019-07-01 03:57:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15766122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WInger/pseuds/WInger
Summary: Aboard the Voltron Lions, two parties compete for the loyalty of one good boy.---“Kosmo took it,” Pidge borderline whispers, clasping her hands together in front of her face, biting her lower lip and wincing apologetically.“I’ll send it back to you now,” Keith assures him. “Kosmo,” he orders sternly, sticking the underwear into the mouth before Pidge could tell him to at least put them in a bag – “Red Lion. Go.”It really shouldn’t have surprised them when five minutes of awkward silence later, Allura comes calling from the Blue Lion about an out-of-control pet with stolen underwear in its mouth – hers included – instead.---





	It's A Kind Of Heart Allergy

**Author's Note:**

> Because Kosmo makes her miss Bae Bae.

For some reason, while the humanoid passengers swapped around the other Lions often enough, Keith’s humongous wolf-lion-dog seemed to be in the Green Lion cockpit an awful lot. It was to the point that even his owner commented about the mutinous sentiment emitting from his pet. “Why does he keep going to you?” Keith asks Pidge on their private channel, supremely unamused.

“I don’t know,” she mumbles. Whenever the wolf-lion-dog appeared out of literal thin air she always felt on edge and a lot more conscious about making physical movements. Next to teeth this big and sharp, only an idiot wouldn’t. Prior this this she’d just unlocked the penultimate boss level in _Killbot Phantasm I_ for the very first time, but it looks like she wouldn’t be returning to that level anytime soon.

“Good doggy,” she whispers, feeling eyes on her. After all this time, it seemed to have gotten used to the machinery, but any canine would eventually need something to chew on, and Pidge was naturally concerned that her own limbs might appear as a bite-toy option to him.

“Come back,” Keith implores, hardly making it clear as to who he was talking to.

“Keith, just name him already.” She keeps her tone neutral and quiet, in case the pet was protective of his owner.

“I’m waiting for him to come out to me.”

That- That was a joke. Pidge lets her mouth fall open slightly as she gawks at Keith. He stares back, deadpan, before closing communications with a “Play nice, both of you.”

Pidge makes her best puppy eyes at the wolf-lion-dog, hoping it gets the message to keep a distance away from her.

It responds with a massive lick on the left side of her helmet, so no, it didn’t get the message.

* * *

 

Since the wolf-lion-dog insisted on being in the Green Lion, no matter how much Pidge or Keith pleaded with him, something had to give. And the Green Lion Paladin was nothing if not adaptable, right? Also, the wolf-lion-dog must have picked up that she wasn’t exactly thrilled about the big licks, and seemed to be withholding it, choosing instead to give her an unrelenting side-eye the last few times it visited.

She sticks out her left hand in front of its snout, not sure what the etiquette with this kind of deep-space animal was. Keith himself was of no help. The question is, was this beast more wolf, more lion, or more dog?

The wolf-lion-dog goes cross-eyed staring at her hand, but doesn’t sniff her back. Instead, it opens its mouth very slightly and gives a tiny little lick to her pinky finger.

The bundle of nerves that she’d been holding back (because predatory animals could sense fear) unravels a little, and she lets a grin sneak its way onto her face. There’s an entirely different feeling inside her chest now as she thinks of the dog that she’d left without warning on Earth.

In response to her display of acceptance, the wolf-lion-dog widens his jaws further and gently takes all five of her fingers inside its mouth.

“No, boy!”

* * *

 

For all that Allura had complained about the wolf-lion-dog chewing on everything in available sight in the first and only time he’d been in the Blue Lion, he seemed pretty unbothered in Green, preferring to rest either right next to her chair or somewhere along the level of the control panel. He liked to watch her with his two front paws folded one on top of the other.  

To be fair, Pidge did provide him a wide selection of safe rubbish chew-toys she’d collected from her brief time on the home planet of the rainbow-colored murder floofs, so safe to say he was feeling pretty comfortable here.

* * *

 

They warm to each other. The feeling is mutual and perhaps a tad strong for his real owner, who looks increasingly disgruntled every time he calls to check up on the Green Lion. It doesn’t help that _Kosmo_ – thank you, Lance! – has moved onto a higher level of intimacy with Pidge, and now liked to rest his head on her thigh or sit his whole body in her lap. As always, Keith looks most frustrated when Coran’s the only one in Black with him.

“Come back to me,” he pleads, using his puppy eyes. Pidge laughs, because Kosmo is licking her neck, and discreetly hits a button to start recording. “Sorry, what was that, Keith? Didn’t catch it.”

“ _Please_ come back to me.” Boy, Pidge couldn’t wait for the day to come when this recording would prove itself useful. There’s a lot of background noise coming from the Black Lion cockpit over the intercom, which she instantly recognizes as Altean punk rock  because of the sheer number of times Coran had “accidentally” played his old band music over the Castle of Lions’ speakers.

“Use his name, Keith!” She had to raise her voice to be heard.

“I don’t accept that name,” Keith growls, in a way that was quite similar to his pet.

“Kosmo!” Pidge calls. Proving her point, he licks all over her helmet and wags his tail excitedly. “Well, at least one good boy here knows his name.”

At that point, either Keith hangs up or Coran knocks the end call button doing… whatever it is he was doing.

* * *

 

Even though Kosmo liked sleeping on her, he’s kind of a big beast and Pidge is kind of the smallest Paladin. She put together a makeshift bed out of unused blankets on the floor next to her bed for him, but she could tuck him in there from the start, and halfway through the night she would feel floof against her feet or in her side, tickling her face. Pretty soon she gives up trying to force him to take the floor space and just starts snuggling back when Kosmo crawls in next to her.

* * *

 

It’s not like she really minds. Back on Earth she kept getting yelled at for sneaking Bae Bae onto her bed. But one night with Kosmo’s fur in one of her nostril’s, she suddenly wonders if Keith bathes him. He had a smell to him – not pungent, just extremely dog-like. And she knows, realistically, that he couldn’t be that dirty if all was doing was going in between the Lions. To be honest, bathing a dog was something that she considered a chore because it was a lot less straightforward than the way most people make it sound; and Bae Bae hated getting into contact with water. She usually left that to her brother and father…

Still she wondered. Maybe she would brush him next time he came.

* * *

 

It takes several attempts to get Kosmo used to a brush that she literally pulled out of the trash planet. It’s clean, though, she’s got it properly sterilized and stuff. Most of her grooming attempts end up turning into a fast-paced, drawn-out, extended hide-and-seek match involving every nook and cranny of the Green Lion’s interior, and she concludes that it’s neither the fault of the bristles nor her brushing technique, but just Kosmo being in his naughty adolescence age.

He acts up a little, and at first it was funny when in his frenzied appearance-disappearance between Green and Black, he starts bringing along some of Keith’s clothing. His grey shirts. A pair of pants. One sock. Really, it was only inevitable that he would end up bringing underwear, dropping two of them next to her right hand on the control panel in a highlydeliberate manner. Having kind of expected it meant that she was able to refrain from screaming. “No underwear, Kosmo!” She’d scolded. “Bring it back to Keith!” She winced at the thought of all that fur sticking into those cotton briefs.

Kosmo disappears. Within five minutes Keith was on the intercom with her, sheepishly saying “I know the underwear aren’t yours. But they’re not mine, either.”

Pidge sucks on the inside of her cheeks. “Shiro?” she suggests, deciding to thick-skin through this conversation, since she was partially responsible for it.

“They’re too small for Shiro and Hunk both,” Keith says matter-of-factly. He picks one of them up with chopsticks. “Coran?” he says. “Or Lance?”

She forces herself to swallow down her misgivings and appraise the piece of material with as much of a straight face as she could manage. The brazen firetruck-red color seemed to say Lance. But Coran had that handmade red power rangers suit thing that he used previously to audition for the Red Lion, so maybe he had a preference for red as well? Then again, the look of it struck her as a pretty typical Earth design. Altean briefs must surely look different.

“I think Lance,” she says, scrunching her eyebrows together to indicate uncertainty.

“Okay, Kosmo, bring this to-“

“Wait, Keith! Shouldn’t you at least check with him?”

“Right,” he says, defeated. With great reluctance, he pushes a button to call up the Red Lion.

It takes forever for Lance to answer. When he finally appears he’s lethargically peeling lemon slices off his eyes. “Keith, your right-hand man is not gonna be able to do his job right if you keep interrupting his eight-hour beauty sleep routine with militaristic exercises,” he groans at one octave deeper than his regular pitch.

Clearing his throat, Keith goes, “I know. Sorry, but Lance… Is this yours?” His voice is soft and quiet – probably hoping to keep Lance in that state of half-sleep so that he wouldn’t come to his full senses and freak the hell out.

It proved to be wishful thinking as together, Pidge and him observe Lance’s heavy eyes slowly widen in surprise, and then narrow again with focused clarity. “Yes,” he answers, his tone sharpening, and his eyes quickly darting to Pidge before going back to Keith.

“What about this?” Keith picks up the other one, a deep blue color, with the words “HOT STUFF” printed in bold red font across the back. She would have laughed if it weren’t for Lance staring at the two of them like he was looking through the sniper scope of his rifle. Not many people could look intimidating with pink paste all over their face and a blue headband pulling back all their hair, but Lance was killing the look. 

“Yeah.”

“Kosmo took it,” Pidge borderline whispers, clasping her hands together in front of her face, biting her lower lip and wincing apologetically.

“I’ll send it back to you now,” Keith assures him. “Kosmo,” he orders sternly, sticking the underwear into the mouth before Pidge could tell him to at least put them in a bag – “Red Lion. Go.”

It really shouldn’t have surprised them when five minutes of awkward silence later, Allura comes calling from the Blue Lion about an out-of-control pet with stolen underwear in its mouth – hers included – instead.

* * *

 

The chapter only wraps up two hours later with everybody up and fully involved. Bras, underwear, socks, tops, bottoms, jackets, and even bath towels. Pidge thought she’d all her stuff accounted for, until she recovers six individual socks, all from different pairs, from Coran’s possession in the Yellow Lion – he said he’d been so close to starting a collection. By the end of it, Shiro ends up with five mysterious skin-tight black shirts that he swears aren’t his (though they’re his size and his size only), and Keith reunites with the old jacket he’d left in the Castle of Lions prior to his joining of the Blades. 

“Wow,” he says. “Did one of you take this for me?” he comments, missing the knowing looks Hunk and Pidge were throwing at each other while the Red Lion Paladin hangs up without another word.

* * *

 

After that, since Keith and her had been the only ones defending Kosmo’s actions in that fiasco, everybody took it to mean that Pidge and Kosmo were best buddies. She might even be like, half his owner. After all, Kosmo did choose to spend his time equally between Black and Green of his own accord. All of this was much to Keith’s chagrin, which was unfortunate, but it doesn’t bother Pidge or Kosmo, who have found happiness in each other. They play this little game where Pidge would stick out her thumb at random locations inside the Green Lion and Kosmo would respond immediately by booping his nose on it.

As he more or less had a fixed schedule, she now knows pre-emptively when Kosmo would appear, getting attuned to the slight disturbance in the air that foretold his magical teleportation. She’s so used to it, she’s started holding a hand out in a scratch-ready position without looking, knowing she’s accurate down to the second.  

Their synchrony was nothing less than perfect, and she even got it done live once while they were holding their team meeting, right in Keith’s face. Until this one time she does it and Kosmo’s fur doesn’t feel quite the same. For some reason it’s not as long or shaggy as usual. It’s much softer, and much shorter.

“What happened to your hair, boy?” she says, looking down much too late to see that she hadn’t been scratching Kosmo at all.

Shiro has an expression full of anticipation on his face. “It’s all Kosmo’s fault,” he says delicately.

“ _Yeoooooowl!!_ ” She screams in embarrassment anyway.

“I’m sorry,” Shiro winces. “I’m so sorry, Pidge! I don’t even know where that damn dog is!”

Once Pidge felt calmer and reasonably confident that the heat had faded from her face, she offers him a game controller wordlessly, knowing in her heart that she was never letting herself live that moment down.

“Pidge… I can’t play with only one hand.”

* * *

 

It turns out Keith had privately instructed Hunk to make dog treats, and the reason why _that_ had taken place was because he’d used one to entice Kosmo to stay in Black. Kosmo had brought Shiro to Green as a substitute before quickly going back to eat.

“Who’s a good boy?” Keith says, all too smug as he scratches the back of Kosmo’s ears. It was a particularly good shift for Keith. His mom was asleep and the mice, cow, Coran, Romelle and Shiro were all in other Lions.

Gearing up, Pidge leans forward and whines into the intercom. “Kosmo…” she says sadly.

He’s looking at her. The good boy’s attention was on her, momentarily forgetting the Hunk-a-Treat between his paws.

“No!” Keith orders the both of them and dramatically ends the call. Fine. Now all she had to do was place an order for Hunk-a-Treats from the chef himself.

“Did something happen?” Hunk laughs when she contacts him.

“Keith and I are in competition,” she explains. “Can you give me one that’s a different flavor from his?”

“Well, yeah I can. Though there’s this one little thing I wanted to ask you about.”

“Shoot.”

“So me and Lance know Keith’s got Kosmo instead of you, and we worked out where everybody else went this shift…”

“Uh-huh?”

“And we’re right, so that must mean… You pet Shiro’s head, didn’t you?”

Pidge narrows her eyes at Hunk’s shit-eating grin. Already she could see Lance sporting an identical expression in her head. Seriously, _boys_. “And if I confirm it, what are you guys planning to do with that information?”

“Woah. Hang on a sec. Don’t include me in it. It’s mostly Lance who wants to lord it over you for the rest of eternity.” There it is, Hunk’s sixth sense – with a working accuracy of 75%, getting his ass out of troubles before they fully formed. 

“Oh, yeah? Send him my way. Let me tell him myself.”

* * *

 

Lance calls up the Green Lion. He’s greeted not by Pidge, but with Keith’s “ _Please come back to me_ ” big grey eyes shining at the full power of a million watts. He’s stunned. Clearly surprised, the smirk slides off his face as he mumbles “ _What_? Keith? Wha-what are you…” in a voice as soft as marshmallows, his cheeks taking on a soft rosy tinge.

Damn right Pidge was recording. She turns off the Keith video and meets Lance’s outright disappointment with a superior smirk, giving him time to slowly come to his senses before starting to bargain.

“I’ll explain whether or not I petted Shiro to you if you’re willing to explain this reaction to Keith.” She snapped her fingers and the new recording of Lance plays in the top-right corner of their interface.

Lance scowls. “How the hell did you even get Keith on video? It’s fake! You edited it!”

“Why would I go to all that trouble for? You want me to give you context as to how it happened…” She raises her eyebrows. “I’ll show this to Keith-“

“Do _not_. I’ll back off, so you leave me alone!” 

He cuts their communication without another word. It’s Pidge’s victory. She leans back into her chair and spins with deep satisfaction, only to jump out of her skin when she sees Shiro behind her, judging her with raised eyebrows and a hand on his hip.

“Why don’t you make any noise when you move?” she cries, holding her heart.

“Really? Blackmailing Lance?”

She bites her lower lip and bats her eyes, like she used to do with Matt whenever he got exasperated with her. Nice, innocent, sweet little smile.

He continues to look unimpressed, so she holds out that modified single-hand controller she’d previously thrown together for him in under half an hour for the express purpose of allowing the two of them to play _Killbot Phantasm_ together.

Shiro sighs and takes it.

* * *

 

Now that she’s secured her own batch of Hunk-a-Treats, it was time to put the big plan into action. That massive clothes-swap that had come to light during sleeping hours had greatly soured Kosmo’s reputation, so it was now down to Pidge to redeem the big floof in everybody’s eyes with a well-timed bath. If she could pull this off, then, _well_ , Keith had one coming. Since Shiro was now residing in the Green Lion, she was able to enlist his much-needed help for the task.

First and foremost, preparing for the bath took quite some. She didn’t have a specific grooming product to use on Kosmo’s fur, but she asked for a mild, non-irritating bath fragrance from Coran all the same, because no one liked the smell of a wet dog. Shiro put on one of his new black skintight v-necks, since he didn’t care much for them. She puts on one of those as well, since he had four more and he _really_ didn’t care for them. Then she had to do the impossible of pulling all the strands of her short frizzy hair into a chicken feet ponytail, using bobby pins from Romelle and conditioner to get all the strays. Lastly she forces Shiro to pin his fringe down with a hairclip.

“This should be a job for somebody with two working arms,” he complains, squatting on the other side of the tub. As it is the only tub on the Green Lion, maybe he’s disgruntled at having to share it with a shaggy beast whose thick grey-blue fur would unquestionably clog up the pipes.

It surprised her a little, seeing Shiro express any sort of unwillingness in regards to performing an act of responsibility, but he’d been a lot more relaxed ever since Keith came back. She’d thought that it was because of his literal resurrection, but maybe also he was kicking back now that the weight of the universe had been lifted off his shoulders.  

“These Hunk-a-Treats will get Kosmo to do my every bidding,” she assures him, with the same amount of gusto as she would Matt, matched with a cocky, reassured smile – as much as she was internally hoping for that statement to hold true. Surely, if they were enough to get Kosmo to pick Keith over Pidge, they would definitely be enough to get Kosmo into some nice-smelling lukewarm water.

Speak of the devil. A head pokes into view from outside the bathroom door, curious as to what the two humans inside were doing.

“Kosmo!” she sings. “Look what Katie’s got!”

She successfully baits him completely through the door. Shiro moves quickly and closes it. Kosmo gets wary, but she unwraps the Hunk-a-Treat and holds it over the bath. “Come on, boy!”

Kosmo pauses and does a full scan of the whole toilet, eyeballing the tub of water, Pidge, Shiro, the Hunk-a-Treat in her hand, and the remaining Hunk-a-Treats in the far corner. Pidge holds her breath. It dawns on her afresh that his intelligence was probably multiple times that of an ordinary dogs’ and that if Kosmo really didn’t want to, he could just disappear back to Keith’s side. This was, as Pidge had known from the start, a battle over affection and trust, and a competition to decide _who_ should be the one get custody over Kosmo – but now she was just getting ahead of herself.

The moment of truth. Kosmo lifts a paw and sticks it into the water, his eyes fixed on the Hunk-a-Treat in her hand. The air is so still, she thinks Shiro must also be holding his breath. Apparently deciding that the temperature of the water was fine, Kosmo teleports in, and doing so only displaces a very minor amount of water onto the sides of the tub.

“Good boy!” she cheers, giving him the entire Hunk-a-Treat, the first in 20 pieces.  

* * *

 

“How does the delivery boy smell today?” she asks, pinging Hunk around the time as he was prepping breakfast.

“Like sunshine”, he affirms, turning the act of tying Kosmo’s delivery bundle into a full hug.

* * *

 

Allura contacts her before she could, with Romelle in the background… rope-skipping with Kosmo? “I’m actually quite pleased with that Altean fragrance you got from Coran,” she says with a smile. “I guess his tastes and mine are similar. But look, you must see this. Even the mice aren’t afraid of Kosmo anymore!”

And indeed, now that she looked closely behind Allura, she could see Coran holding the other end of the rope with Romelle, with the four mice jumping irregularly on top of Kosmo as _he_ jumped the actual rope.

“Nice!” Pidge tells her.  

* * *

 

It’s possible that Keith looks a little peeved when she checks up on the Black Lion next. Krolia, on the other hand, leans into the frame from the top left corner with _I’m impressed_ written all over her features. “I never – and I’ve been with him ever since he was born – I never knew that dog could smell so good.”

Pidge smiles with all her teeth, savoring the rare moment of one-upping her friend in front of his mother. “So he _is_ a dog?”

“Keith tells me he is.”

Well then. “You’re _welcome_ , Keith.”

* * *

 

The true test was Lance, the biggest germaphobe Pidge knew, but the sight of him chilling on top of a snoozing Kosmo on the floor of his cockpit instantly put her mind to ease. “I’m surprised you would rather have him smell like Coran than Allura,” Lance comments in a lazy voice. He says it in a haughty way and he looks unimpressed and casual, but Pidge _knows,_ in an unspoken way, that he’s pleased. This was – not that Pidge wanted to take all the credit, this was _progress_.    

“You’ll thank me when it happens, Lover Boy Lance.”

“What?” he goes, feigning ignorance, but he gets what she means, alright.

* * *

 

“As things are, our food resources will keep us sustained us for another three months, but I think we should make a stop on some random viable planet – along the way, of course – in order to replenish stocks.”

“Alright, noted. Anybody have anything else to add?”

They were doing their regularly scheduled status report spearheaded by Keith, where everyone, pilots and passengers both, got to make a statement or two to everybody on board Voltron.

“Yes. Keith and I have decided to take joint custody of Kosmo.”

 _“What?”_ A single sentence from Pidge has responsible, in-control Black Paladin Keith derailing and quickly replaced by his more familiar counterpart, which is squabbly, territorial Keith. “We agreed on _no_ such thing!”

Pidge shrugs and opens up her hands out in front of her screen. “A true dog owner bathes their own dog.”

“I thought you were being generous!”

“ _Me_.” She points a finger in her face and makes sure to eye all the other people on all the other cameras. “I bathed Kosmo. You’re _all_ welcome.”

“ _I_ raised him-“

 And at the same time, Shiro and Krolia both interject:

“Technically I helped bathe Kosmo with you, Pidge. Do I get part ownership too?”

“You never tried to bathe him once during our time in the Quantum Abyss, Keith. You kept saying the rain was sufficient.”

“Gross, Keith.” Lance throws in his five cents. “I, for one, think that Pidge is justified because she put in more effort helping the rest of us bond with your pet then _you_ ever did.”

“ _You_ were the one going on and on about drool and germs and not wanting Kosmo anywhere near you! So I kept him away-“

“Come here, Kosmo.” Lance talks over him and directly address the dog in question. “Come cuddle with Uncle Lance in Red.” He stands and holds both his arms out.

The way Kosmo immediately obeys him shuts everybody up, teleporting directly into Lance’s princess carry like a happy baby. Lance laughs in genuine pleasure. Most important of all was the look on Keith’s face as it struggled to make a choice between dismay or delight. She grins at him, waggling her brows and making sure to hold eye contact long enough for him to start thinking about the full implications that Pidge’s act of goodwill had done _for_ him.

“We get equal hours,” she tells him. Not a negotiation. “I need him for my heart.”

**Author's Note:**

> I was inspired as a dog owner.
> 
> EDIT: Not sure if anybody guessed, but Shiro’s skin-tight black shirts are a secret gift from Coran, who’s been holding on to them ever since The Voltron Show. Extra author's notes related to fic headcanons [here](https://resultingingoodfaith.tumblr.com/post/177582125969/very-extra-author-notes-nice-headcanons-while-the)


End file.
